Principal Investigator Ruonan Han
Affordable, compact THz imaging system at room temperature is critical for THz sensing in security and biomedical areas. Silicon CMOS technology is well suited for this task, but THz detection with good sensitivity requires the re-engineering of devices. Without modifying the CMOS process, we utilize a custom-designed Schottky diode with fT of 2 THz in our chips.
Chip Prototypes:
(*) 280-GHz image sensor in 130-nm digital CMOS -- This chip is among the world’s first terahertz sensors that implements integrated antenna, multiplexing and low-noise amplifiers on a single chip for lensless imaging system. The measured overall noise-equivalent power (NEP) is 29pW/Hz1/2.
(*) 280-GHz and 860-GHz -- The measured NEPs are 32pW/Hz1/2 (280 GHz) and 42pW/Hz1/2 (860 GHz). In addition to imaging, these small-parasitic detectors can also be deployed in the future THz quasi-optical data receivers.